Without a pronunciation dictionary, it's impossible to guess that Houston Street in New York is pronounced /ˈhaʊstən/, unlike the city of Houston in Texas. These two Houstons are named after different people that pronounced their names differently, but it's only Houston, TX that is listed in most existing dictionaries with the /ˈhjuːstən/ pronunciation. There are countless other homographs that have different pronunciations depending on meaning and that cannot be found in traditional dictionaries. There is at least one Houston in each US state, not even counting street names...

Ora's solution

To overcome the limitations of traditional pronunciation dictionaries, Cofactor Ora integrates with the Google Knowledge Graph and lets everyone edit and contribute pronunciations of words: both audio recordings and IPA pronunciation respellings.

Integration with the Google Knowledge Graph

Traditional dictionaries cannot unambigously define the location of each Houston with a paragraph or two of text. Referencing an entity in the Google Knowledge Graph, each place name in Ora is linked to a location in Google Maps. In case of people, the Knowledge Graph links to the Wikipedia articles about each person and their social media profiles. This allows Ora to list pronunciations for any number of people, places, and things that ever existed and to outgrow any existing pronunciation dictionary.

Crowdsourcing pronunciation knowledge

It would be nearly impossible for a handful of traditional dictionary editors to confirm the correct pronunciations of all people and places on Earth. By allowing everyone to share their pronunciation knowledge, Ora can collect correct pronunciations of any number of named entities. You can learn more about the difference between named entities and regular dictionary headwords here.

Why your contributions are important

It's only through collaboration and participation of communities from all over the world and experts from domains of science and industry that Ora can acheive its goal of becoming the largest pronunciation dictionary of named entities. Being a free and ad-free source of structured pronunciation data, Ora helps raise awareness of language preservation and promotes linguistic research.